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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22524580">Hands Like Leaves</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/JellyDishes/pseuds/JellyDishes'>JellyDishes</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dragon Age II</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, dream sequences abound</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 11:40:56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,804</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22524580</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/JellyDishes/pseuds/JellyDishes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Desire demons can tempt you with far more than physical pleasure, just as Marian Hawke has far more left to lose than she could have anticipated.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Hands Like Leaves</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Marian hadn’t meant to fall asleep, any more than she’d meant to fall in love. It happened slowly, and all at once, a gradual lossening of her grasp on the stack of paperwork, busy work, whatever work she’d been able to find for herself that would keep her occupied, keep her distracted, keep her from looking up from her writing desk to an empty room in an empty house. Filled with treasures and trinkets, physical traces from the passing of the dead.</p><p>Statues and books and and wines and wisps of ribbon left, still, on her bedside table. It had been their routine every day, every morning, since Marian’s hands had been big enough, sure enough, to wind the splash of colored fabric in amongst her mother’s hair. Before that, she’d sat warm within the close of Leandra’s arms and hummed, sang, winding the high crack of her voice with Leandra’s. The song hadn’t mattered. Sometimes it was a silly thing, or a dirty thing, and sometimes it was a strange song, a lilting song brought to her over the oceans and the years to this moment, stretched between them with a length of ribbon. They had sat heavy in her chest, those songs, and she’d found herself humming along to one of them the day she’d turned to see that ribbon, mouth parting to open around the first words, and had sat down again, hard. Ordered Bodahn to take it away, to box it up in a room that had itself been boxed away, locked as tight as a secret never told. Given explicit orders that she knew he would disobey. Would curl the ribbon with careful hands around the gown Leandra had had lain out on the edge of her bed for the next day, all silk and lace and curling purple blossoms she’d had clipped from the tree outside her window.</p><p>She hadn’t meant to, and wasn’t that a phrase already grown tired and worn on her tongue? Well-worn as the condolences, the letters and the pats and the offers of assistance from men and women she barely knew, that they had no intentions of living up to?</p><p>She hadn’t meant to. Had only meant to rest her aching eyes for a moment, grateful for the exhaustion that painted the back of her eyes as black, as a soft, pinkened thing that bore only the shape of themselves.</p><p>She could have sworn she’d closed them only for a moment, the space of two breaths, but when she opened them again it was to nothing. To blackness, a vast, limitless expanse of black that rose up to join an empty sky. It was not featureless, however. There, growing, was a knot. Dark on dark. Ink spilled on dark paper, on water, blossoming to swirls of color, of texture, of light, a pulse, a gradual clench and release that grew and stretched before until it was everything, until she was nothing and she was caught, helpless to do anything but stare.<br/>
At the grass. At the cottage, with its fresh coat of pain and crooked shutters. At the garden, with the rabbit warren in the southeast corner. At the warm golden glow that came from nowhere and went everywhere, alighting on grey hair gone silver, winking in the light, in metal and furs and in the ruddy gleam of apples she’d tripped and knocked over in her haste to catch bugs, cicadas and grasshoppers and little brothers.</p><p>She remembered this day, so clearly. This was the day Carver had come running up, chest puffed out with pride, clutching the tiniest fish between the chubbiest fingers, stumbling and splashing muddy water all over Bethany’s skirts. This was the day Bethany had shrieked and laughed and ran to hide behind the arch of Malcolm’s shoulders, stirring up a mass of dreamstuff like snow, like a shoal of dust, rising up to hang, frozen, glittering before the light of her smile.</p><p>Everything was silent, hushed, but this scene had played itself out on her eyelids at night long enough, often enough that she was mouthing along with them, trying to force them to come alive just this once, just for now. Willing it to happen, needing it to, but it didn’t.</p><p>Malcolm’s throat bobbed around a laugh just on the edge of hearing. The air shivered with it, reverberated, just on the edge of cracking. But it never did. Her heart clutched and seized in her chest, making her next breath come as a gasp, an intake of air that wasn’t, that did nothing to still the restless, shaking, overwhelming need to hear him, to touch him. She took a stumbling step forward and nearly fell, swept up a trail of silent giggles that swept her up and around and pitched her down on shaking legs.</p><p>Bethany and Carver darted in and out of the encroaching darkness like the silver gleaming thing between Carver’s hands, little gleaming snatches of teeth and hair and muddy, skinned knees, and she was breathless. It was all caught up in her throat, her mouth, waiting to come out as a sob or a cry but she couldn’t, wouldn’t, because she knew that if she made the slightest sound it would break this moment, this spell, and they would be gone, swept away like so much dust, and she just couldn’t. She couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t stop staring at them, watching her siblings at play, and it occurred to her that she’d never really looked at them, like this. Like they had been, every day or their lives. She’d missed it. They had been such a constant, these two, such a sure thing in a life on uncertainties and change, always following after her, always pulling at her sleeves and laughing and arguing and annoying her to the absolute limits of what she could bear, until the day they didn’t. Until the day came that Carver wasn’t there, that he started to withdraw in on himself and his growing envy and fears, the day he had come home from the chantry one day parroting something, some snatch of a sermon that turned Bethany’s face in a mask, a rictus grin that never went away, not really, for days, weeks, years, until the day her smile had grown to kiss a landscape.</p><p>She’d looked away for a moment and when she looked back these two children were gone, all that light that had gathered in the shadows of shared dimples had gone away, while remaining exactly where they were, and she stared, transfixed, until something else caught her attention. There was movement, at the corner of her vision, tearing her away from the twins at last. It was Leandra. There was flour dusting her hair prematurely white and grooves in her pruny fingers and she was so, so beautiful that it hurt to look at her. To breathe. This was her mother as she hadn’t been in years. In forever. She looked so young. They all did, but-</p><p>Wrinkles had already begun to gather and settle in the soft places in her careworn face, the warm places, but her feet stepped so lightly over the grass. Easily. There was a smile tucked into the corners of her mouth that dipped low, pulling Malcolm’s eyes with it as she bent, pressed it to his, where their lips met, curved to fit. She was smiling against him, still, cheeks pressed around his nose and his beard and his breath, and it wouldn’t last, couldn’t.</p><p>Marian was shaking, looking between the two of them, the four of them, at him. Her hands were too small. Stumbled through the workings of magics she’d cast a hundred times, a thousand times before, could have cast in her sleep. Had. Because she was only a little girl and didn’t know them yet, wouldn’t learn them until after this day, because of this day.</p><p>Green light flickered and died between the desperate clutch of her fingers, slipping away like so much sand. Just like it had before. Just like it always did, every time. And every time Malcolm bent to her, as he was now, pressing the round of his nose against hers with a laugh she could feel but not hear. It ruffled her hair. The girl Marian had caught at it and laughed. The woman Marian was now caught at him, at them, but he slipped away like the magic had, faster, already turning away to say something unseen to Leandra.</p><p>Her mother touched her lips with the tips of her fingers, the bow of her mouth fluttering under her laugh, her pinkened cheeks, and she didn’t look at Marian, not once, even when Marian ran to her, was shouting, because the Marian in life hadn’t done either of those things. She’d gotten distracted by a frog and had run off to catch it, to dump it down the back of Bethany’s dress, and so she’d missed this moment.</p><p>She hadn’t seen it, heard it. Hadn’t been paying attention to this one, last private moment between them. One last moment where the sun had shone down on them, all of their hard-won freedoms and sacrifices culminating in this smile, this hand cupped to Leandra’s cheek. Her lips pressed a promise between those split palms, and there was nothing hidden in that curve, nothing held back or missing or lost.</p><p>In a moment, Malcolm would cough, would clutch at his chest, the lines of his face crumpling in on themselves in a sudden, shocked pain. Before he remembered himself. Before he laughed it off, before he swung Leandra up onto his shoulders and paraded her before his clapping children. Before he died.<br/>
Marian only slowly became aware of the clutch of fingers at her mouth. They were so pale, so bloodless in their grip, that they didn’t even feel like hers. But they were. It was her fingers, her mouth, her staring eyes fixed on the same four people that would never see her, never stop laughing. Never stop dying.<br/>
Caught as she was, it was a moment before she noticed the silver moon cast to Malcolm’s eyes, the heavy swishing pass of a presence disturbing the air between them, as of the giants that had passed beneath their boat on the way from Gwaren. A smoky laugh trailing liquid over her skin. A demon. Always before, they’d offered her power or money or tempting, teasing glances at a better life, a life where she didn’t have to be alone, to worry, but not this. Never this.</p><p>“Marian.”</p><p>Always before, she’d been able to resist.</p><p>“Marian, let’s go home.”</p><p>Always before, she’d had so much to lose, with so little to gain.</p><p>Marian lifted up her hands, and the darkness howled in the back of her mind.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading this far! I apologize in advance if I am late responding to any comments, as I have severe social anxiety and it can be difficult for me. I appreciate every word, however, just as I appreciate your taking the time to read my story. Thank you &lt;333</p></blockquote></div></div>
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